New Sonic 2 development lore drop - Genocide/Cyber City palette and art!

That still reinforces the idea that WFZ was intended by the designers to play in whatever the final zone was, which was always going to be Death Egg.

While it's true that "we don't know" and may never know, that doesn't mean every single scenario is equally as likely to have happened. Some theories are more plausible than others. The Titanic was found in two pieces, and some people have invented hypothetical scenarios that would've caused that while simultaneously explaining how the ship went down in one piece, but generally anyone who follows that event just accepts that the ship broke in two prior to sinking. Even though technically we have no clue what happened that night, because we weren't there.

Sonic is different, though. This community is skeptical about everything, no matter how simple of an explanation it could be.

 

If Death Egg was originally to be a larger zone, it might have set the tone differently to what we ultimately got, which was a short level with copy/paste artwork from Chemical Plant.

Having a triumphant run through a zone with Sonic saving the day would have made sense. They did a similar thing with Sky Sanctuary. I imagine that Cyber City could have used a slightly different arrangement of the final Death Egg track, as it’s quite possible the final arrangement was tweaked based on how it fit with the final design. The level may have then moved Sonic up an elevator shaft to the launching egg. The first boss could have been Mecha Sonic for act 1, then Death Egg Robot for act 2 as the final boss, as it is in the final.

Edit:

This is why it’s so hard to place music, as people can have different interpretations. It seems pretty cut and dry to me that the music is almost prehistoric, caveman-like with the beat of the drum, but clearly not to everybody. My point is that we’re pre-conditioned to hear this music now so it’s not necessarily natural for us to now try and place it elsewhere .

 

I just wish people would be more cautious and not say things like 'x theme was definitely going to be played in x zone' or 'x theme was confirmed to be played in x zone'.

I mean I think the line of thinking that 'x theme must certainly go with x zone because it so obviously fits x atmosphere' is completely worthless and not even worth comment. It is entirely subjective. One person thinks Oil Ocean obviously fits a desert theme because it sounds Arabian. I think it obviously fits Oil Ocean because it sounds Arabian. The entire movement of attributing authorial intent based upon feeling is methodologically illiterate in my eyes. I can hear Sky Chase demo as Christmasy so fitting Winter Zone. Not everyone will.

I do commend @The Joebro64 for actually using evidence from prototypes. But I wish he and others would word it differently. Say 'Wing Fortress theme may have been intended for Death Egg because it was the Death Egg theme for several prototypes'. Not it is 'confirmed'.

There are loads of reasons why certain levels may have been associated with certain songs in prototypes in the same way certain levels were associated with certain names (Dust Hill cough) but may never have been intended to be called that.

Maybe the developers used the themes as placeholders until they got round to reordering the themes. The fact they were happy for certain yhemes to be played incorrectly for jingles in prototypes shows correct BGM was not a priority.

Maybe they thought some songs played better for certain levels at certain points, changed their minds, and the prototypes don't even reflect when they thought which song should go with which zone. They could have decided to change songs long before actually changing them in the prototypes themselves.

We just don't know for certain and it's okay to admit that.

Having theories is good and fun. But we should always be cautious in our suggestions.

 

Could we take the music debate to the other thread? This goes well beyond the scope of relevancy to GCZ at this point, which should still be the main focus of this thread.

 

Go necro my thread.

I only kept talking about this because it's tangentially related to what music would've played for CCZ.

 

Have there been any extra discoveries on the layout we have?

 

To reiterate what we know...

- Tom Payne worked exclusively on GCZ and Metropolis. He also drew enemies that would appear in multiple zones outside of these 2.
- Tom Payne recycled some of the assets in an unreleased game called B-Bomb. These were in discs that were recovered 4 years ago when he first handed parts of his original haul.
- Tom Payne recycled some of the assets in "The Machine" in Spinball. The palette of the Machine also closely resembles what we have for GCZ/CCZ.
- Some elements and objects from Cyber City appear to have moved over to Metropolis (The crushing pistons in act 3?), with less of them surviving the closer we get to the final version of the stage.
- Yashuhara tended to recycle unused stage design gimmicks and ideas from Sonic 2 to Sonic 3, leaving open the possibility that some GCZ concepts (but not art) made it into other stages like Sonic 3&K's Death Egg Zone.
- There is circumstantial evidence pointing to at least some objects from GCZ making it into WFZ, with a smaller possibility of some (or even many) art assets being recycled into the zone, but as of now we don't have any smoking guns to confirm this. It remains a theory.

That's really about all we can say for sure right now.

 

I'm guessing more will be discovered when we get the rest in a few days and then with 500 documents to comb through we'll still be discovering stuff for quite a while.

And then we've gotta go through all the other stuff we already have and see if this new stuff recontextualises it (making minimal assumptions of course).

I'm hella excited!!!

gonna be one hell of a job putting it all the wiki though

 

There's precedence for it. We were SURE that Metropolis 3 was the intended layout for Cyber City. We were SURE that Dust Hill Zone was a desert level (I blame myself for that one). Heck, there was a time that most everyone thought there was a Sonic 2 / CD connection (I pushed that pretty hard once upon a time). We've gotten a lot right, but we've also been surprised when things turned out to be not at all as they once appeared. So the burden of proof needs to be fairly high. I believe there are some things we can conclude definitively, but there's a lot we simply can't.

The Genocide City maps are proving us to have gotten things really wrong. Not that there isn't still a connection between it and Metropolis, but it's not the way we thought things were. So we now need to figure out what Yugi Naka was actually saying in that Metropolis Zone quote.

 

I'd be interested to see if any depiction of the Death Egg appears in any potential Cyber City graphics. You'd assume there would be a cutscene to link CCZ and the "final battle in space" together if there's no Sky Chase or Wing Fortress in the concept.

I always found it odd how, outside of the small section at the end of the Wing Fortress cutscene and the icon on the level select screen, you never actually see what it looks like from the outside. Led to Fleetway's artist for this strip having to guess what it probably looked like!

 

I wouldn't be surprised if it wouldn't have looked too different to the "Death Egg" that appears in the animated Japanese commercial for Sonic 1 (@ 0:16).



Funny that this commercial also includes an Americanized Desert and a "Blue Ocean" of sorts, but thats just me thinking too deep and is most likely coincidence.

Edit: just remembered that theres a level select icon for Death Egg Zone and it looks like the Death Egg we know

 

So if the layout of Metropolis Act 3 don't actually come from cyber city where did it come from?

Either way, hat Naka quote about Metropolis having 3 acts because they reused a level that was only going to appear once is interesting as we have an act 3 layout for Genocide City. They clearly had the idea of a 3 act final zone.

Might have something to do with the zone having two positions on the map. One of the things my head wants answers too is why Genocide City and Genocide City 2 both exist on the map.

 

One thing to also keep in mind is the possibility of more than one theory technically being 'right' since we know stuff commonly got changed or moved around in the development of the games. We have evidence of what Cyber City was like at ONE stage in development but that could easily have been different in earlier or later stages.

For example the Metropolis map might still have been Cyber City at SOME point despite us having proper maps now, especially since those documents seem to have the moving rhombus shape from beta Act 3 and there don't seem to be any areas that utilise it in the new maps. Maybe the MTZ 3 map was Cyber City later on when they decided to skim it down to one act.

 

Well. Something I noticed which might be interesting. Death Egg's original concept. If you look at it. Has that unused antenna object from WFZ in it. So maybe during the time crunch they used what art they had for GCZ2 and DEZ and merged it to make WFZ? Since WFZ does have some oddities that don't fit with GCZ2. Just theory lol.

 

Where? I don't see it.

 

Naka's quote seems to imply Metropolis Zone Act 3 is based on a later draft of Genocide City, where we can assume the zone must have been condensed down into one entirely different act from these maps. It's worth noting that even in the early Tom Payne maps, the drafts for Act 3 are titled under Metropolis, not any other zone.

The only other thing I can think of is there really were Genocide City 1 and 2 Zones planned at some point beyond the time travel maps and during the level designing process, and Metropolis Zone Act 3 is based on the 4th act of Genocide City Zone... If that's even the case. Kind of a crackpot theory though. Even if that was the case, it was shot down by the time the in-game level slots were being assigned. There has to be some "missing link" between Genocide City and Metropolis Act 3 we haven't seen yet (...Or Naka was mis-remembering, and Tom Payne designed Metropolis Act 3 from the ground up when Genocide City Zone was canned ).

Either way, this is mostly speculation; when the rest of the scans drop, we'll hopefully get some solid answers.

Interestingly, Act 3 is also the only of his drafts to have Metropolis' giant gears (which Act 2 does have as early as the Simon Wai build).

 

I'm not 100% sure it's the same but does look similar. I'm inclined to believe that's most likely just a background element in that art.

 

We do know that Cyber City was essentially meant to be a Metropolis re-skin. I think maybe that's partially what Naka meant when talking about Act 3?

I think assuming 'Future' was meant to house the final Zones in the game, the team liked the idea of the last 'regular' Zone in the game having 3 Acts, with the 'Final Battle in Space' serving as it's own unique thing (possibly 1 Act? I saw this theorized earlier). Genocide/Cyber City was conceived as this finale with 3 Acts (hence 'GENOCIDE CITY 1 ZONE' and 'GENOCIDE CITY 2 ZONE' on the maps), and really rough level designs were conceived for all three Acts (which is what is depicted in the sketches recently shown off). Naka refers to this as a one act thing because Act 3 would occupy the 'GENOCIDE CITY 2 ZONE' slot.

The team eventually had to begin downsizing realizing the scope of the project was far too ambitious with the deadline given, but they really liked the idea of the last 'regular' Zone having three Acts. Metropolis was the 'parent ' of Cyber City, Metropolis was further along in development than Cyber City, and Cyber City wasn't looking like something they'd want to keep at that point.

The decision was made to scrap Cyber City, but what level design plans they had for Act 3 were taken and re-worked into Metropolis Act 3? So that would make Naka's quote technically correct - what they had for Cyber City Act 3 before that went 'poof' was scooped up and refined further as the deadline approached, keeping the team's vision of the last regular Zone having 3 Acts. It's not like the level design for Metropolis Act 3 was kept exactly as-is between the Simon Wai build and the final build.

I guess that brings up the question though: Do we know why exactly the development staff decided to go with the two act system that replaced Sonic 1's 3 Act System? I assume maybe they felt 3 Acts would simply drag on for too long or was really ambitious with what they were working with (even in an alternative universe where they got a considerable more amount of development time). We know it's something that was decided really early on, but I never heard anything that said 'oh yeah here's why we trimmed it down to 2'.

This discussion also makes me wonder how big the Time Travel plans played into the game's ending originally. I could see the player's Chaos Emerald count determining if the future was ever 'fixed' or not. It maybe kinda explains why Sonic 2 has the least punishing 'Bad Ending' of the original trilogy as well? Eggman gloats in 1, 3 has Angel Island in a pretty sad state, but 2's ending just...determines if Sonic is yellow or not.

 

The main thing we've learned in the past week was that Genocide City was once drafted as a full 3 act zone with all gimmicks fully planned, and some of the digitized assets that were constructed with being built for this stage before it was retooled, then scrapped entirely.

I don't think this revelation suddenly means all the connections we made to Metropolis in the first 10 pages are magically false either. There can be an early 3 Act Genocide Cycle concept, then also a brief time period where Metropolis Zone 3 was considered to be a 1 act Genocide/Cyber City merge after the fact. Tom worked on both stages, so crossing assets is more than reasonable, and they occupied the same space on the time travel maps, so sharing assets between them at least briefly still seems logical as well. It's what happened after the Simon Wai beta when GCZ was completely cut that we want to know. What assets from those digitizer files may have made it into either MZ or WFZ. What badniks may have been considered for the stage, if any.

And then, when we have all of that to document, the fandom can decide what a modern take on the level should look like. I think Hez is pretty close based on what we know so far.